Elizabeth Alexander was raised among monuments. Growing up in Washington, D.C., she was surrounded by them. 

When she was a toddler, her parents took her to the March on Washington in 1963, where hundreds of thousands of protesters brought ebullient life to the steps of the temple-like Lincoln Memorial. When she was a girl, someone told her that the obelisk-shaped Washington Monument was actually “God’s pencil.” As a student, she took field trips to the various memorials whose designs were inspired by Classical architecture. Of these structures, she says she grew to understand “something about their scale and awe.”

She also came to realize everything monuments could distort and elide. . . In the capital, where the breadth of the nation’s history is presumably honored, in a city that in the early 1970s was largely populated by Black people, any depiction of them was exceedingly rare. 

Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2024

Yes, the Emancipation Memorial in D.C.’s Lincoln Park, unveiled in 1876, showed a slave kneeling at the foot of Abraham Lincoln. But that memorial has been rightly criticized for whitewashing the role of Black activists such as Frederick Douglass in ending slavery and for showing emancipated slaves as “kneeling supplicants to a great white savior.” It wasn’t until 1974 that the situation was addressed. That year the “National Council of Negro Women installed a sculpture in honor of educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune across the plaza from Lincoln (which was rotated to face her). It was the first monument to honor an African American and a woman on public land in D.C.”

As head of the Mellon Foundation since 2018, Alexander has taken a leading role in helping the country rethink its monuments. The foundation has committed $500 million to study, preserve and recontextualize monuments—as well as remove them when their communities no longer deem them appropriate. 

The foundation website notes that monuments are just as much about the present and future as they are about the past.

Monuments and memorials—the statues, plaques, markers, and place names that commemorate people and events—are how a country tells and teaches its story. What story does the commemorative landscape of the United States tell? Who are we instructed to honor and uplift, and who do we not see in these potent symbols? Does the civic landscape show an accurate picture of our nation, or propagate a woefully incomplete story? 

Alexander says “monuments are a critical part of the civic landscape. For one, they are public—their forms and their messages absorbed by anyone who happens across them. ‘You’re saying this is a focal point,’ she says. ‘This is where we meditate, where we worship, where we are.'” And as a 2021 national audit showed, our monuments do not reflect our diversity as a country nor the diversity of our history.

Monuments to war outnumber those to other causes. Celebrations of white men outnumber everyone else. Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest are on that list, as is Junípero Serra, the controversial Franciscan friar who established the mission system in California.

Monument Lab’s researchers found that there were more recorded monuments to mermaids (22) than to U.S. congresswomen (2). “The story of the United States as told by our current monuments misrepresents our history,” concluded the report.

Los Angeles Times

Alexander, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2006 for her collection American Sublime, where monuments “materialized in her verses.” And her work on monuments—both as a poet and a major philanthropic leader—has come together in the removal and replacement of the Lee-Jackson windows at the Washington National Cathedral.

Monuments have long been on my mind both professionally and personally, especially monuments around the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. As I wrote in 2020, the history portrayed by those monuments of the Southern restoration period tell a false story. The erased history isn’t what is happening today with the removal of the monuments; instead, the erased history is what happened more than 150 years ago, beginning shortly after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The whole Lost Cause narrative was to change the story from the South’s defense of slavery—of owning other human beings and treating them as property—to one that puts forward the Southern cause as noble, in defense of states rights, and with leadership that stood as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry. Defenders of keeping the Confederate monuments today often add that they are about “heritage, not hate.”

But that easy slogan is just not true. 

Now and Forever: Windows by Kerry James Marshall at Washington National Cathedral with Original Poem by Elizabeth Alexander (2023) by Washington National Cathedral tells the story of the decision in 2017 to permanently remove windows that honored Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and replace them with two new windows at the nation’s best-known house of worship. This short and informative guide to the process includes essays from the cathedral leadership and the artists, histories of how the old windows came to be gifted in 1953, helpful guides to the artists and fabrication process, and more. Richly illustrated and easily accessible, it helps the reader—and ultimately those who view the new windows by acclaimed American artist Kerry James Marshall and accompanying poem by Elizabeth Alexander—put those works in context.

In a short but moving forward, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes, “Stained glass windows have been a feature of churches since the Middle Ages. But this was a different kind of stain, and it would take another 70 years to cleanse it. We celebrate that cleansing and renewal with this publication.”

Dean Hollerith noted that the Cathedral has worked “to model what it means to be repairers of the breach, both in our own lives and in our life as a nation.” One way forward is to fully understand the power of monuments. Our monuments tell stories. Our stories tell what we believe.

More to come . . .

DJB

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UPDATE: In the comments, my friend Sandy Kolb tells a wonderful story about the building of the All American Indian Days memorial in Sheridan, Wyoming. It is a terrific piece of family, community, and regional history and I’m so glad she shared it. Here’s a photo pulled from a local website that shows the memorial and here’s a post with more background and photographs. Many thanks to Sandy! DJB

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Photos of Now and Forever windows from Washington National Cathedral.